Category: WRITING

More Early Modern Women Adventurers (… and others)

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You read my post about Mary Ambree and Dianne Dugaw’s scholarship on women warriors in popular 16th-18th century English culture, and now you want more, you say? You’re in luck: the excellent Stuff you Missed in History Class podcast (which I listen to a lot these days, while driving) has made a few pertinent episodes recently. Here they are: Catalina de Erauso, “the Lieutenant Nun.” Not English, in this case—she was what ended up being called Basque—but a fascinating figure all the same, she was a runaway from a convent (and not actually a nun) as well as a cross-dressing …

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“Prodigal” in Allan Kaster’s Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction!

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I know some people must be wondering if I’m writing anything new these days, since all I have announced lately is reprints of my story “Prodigal,” but this reprint is interesting and cool—and, I think, the last one for a while. “Prodigal” has recently been reprinted in The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 9 edited by Allan Kaster, published by AudioText. There’s a range of formats, but the audiobook version was read by Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari and Henrietta Meire. The book contains stories Nina Allan, Karl Bunker, Matthew Claxton, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Samantha Henderson, Paul McAuley, Cat Rambo, Robert Reed, Lavie Tidhar, and me. It’s very …

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Sponsor Me and I’ll Kill Your 1730s Doppelgänger Horribly

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Yeah, I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-Thon thing. The goal is to raise funds for Clarion West, the excellent SF writing workshop I attended eleven years ago. This year I’m working on the same thing I was working on the last time I signed up for the write-a-thon, though I am working on a new draft of it. A lot of the vague outline is the same, but some of the details differ: https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011840873119744 https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011993172484096 As I noted (in the full conversation with Kate, which for some reason I can’t seem to embed here), the evil plotting Habsburgs are out, …

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Another Prodigal Reprint

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I got another book in the post the other day! Supposedly the publication date for this one in in July, but it seems available at some places, at least: Somehow, my shaggy dog story has been reprinted in three languages so far—Chinese and Czech, along with English—and appeared in two Year’s Best collections so far! This one is The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois  and published by St. Martin’s Griffin (which is MacMillan). It’s the second time Gardner has selected one of my stories to appear in his annual anthology, and as always it’s an honour, …

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How to Play Hazard (The Dice Game)

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Here’s something I came across researching the book project I’m working on right now, set in early Georgian London: hazard, a dice game with crazy rules, though it’s the ancestor of the simplified dice game craps, which I’m pretty sure is familiar to anyone reading this. Kristen Koster has a reasonably good summary of the game here, but I figured I’d try write it up as well, and see if I couldn’t make the rules a little simpler to follow. I figured some notes about cheating would also be appropriate, since that was widespread in dice games historically. Whether you’re …

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“Focus” in Analog

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My short story “Focus” is in the current issue of Analog! I was happy to discover this when I received contributor copies on Friday in the mail. (I’ve been too busy to post an update since then, and likewise I’m so behind on everything that I only noticed the story was out when I received the print copies…) The story is set in Vietnam—in Saigon and a South Korean-run factory complex in nearby Bình Dương Province, and is about how companies parasitize everything—or, rather, convince us to allow them to parasitize everything to better serve their ends. It’s inspired in part …

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Mary Ambree and Female Warriors

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Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writers of fantasy talk about historical female warriors—the historicity of women marching into battle alongside men—and there’s obviously value in looking at history, because there are plenty of dumbasses out there who will be quick to say something stupid like, “But women didn’t march into battle! That’s dumb!” There will be nitwits who will say it’s feminist claptrap, or unbelievable, or implausible, or whatever. (I mean, I suppose we should spend time correcting such ignorance and stupidity when we encounter it, at least occasionally, right? So: yes, it is plausible. There definitely were societies where women …

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Now In Print…

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The past week or so has been good on the writing front, or at least in the publishing front. I finally received my copy of Volume 2 of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Neil Clarke: What a handsome cover! My contributor copy apparently was sitting in the department office, and nobody told me. I happened to stop by and discovered it by chance… and who knows how long it’d been there? (I check my mailbox there, but this was a package so it didn’t fit the cubby and was sitting on a shelf below, where I’ll admit I never look.) Want a …

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Prodigal in SF World

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It’s been a tense time lately here in South Korea, but one bright spot recently was how delighted I found myself when I received contributor copies for the current issue of China’s SF World (the 03.2017 issue). A Chinese translation of my December 2016 Analog story “Prodigal” was published in this issue, and it was wonderful to get a look at it firsthand. It’s an attractive journal-sized magazine with a very colorful, striking cover: It reminded me a little of Science Fiction Age, the 90s SF magazine that I think was really the first such magazine I read regularly. I really found myself wishing I could read all the other material in the …

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Il paese della giovinezza (The Country of the Young)

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Late last week, I got news that “Il paese della giovinezza” (The Country of the Young) was about to be published. It’s an ebook collection of some of my SF stories in Italian translation, which is very exciting! The collection, which was edited by Francesco Verso and published by Future Fiction, includes the following stories: “The Country of the Young” (Interzone 219, November 2008) “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report by Organic” (Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, 2010) “The Bodhisattvas” (Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010) “Alone with Gandhari” (Clarkesworld #42, March 2010.) The cover art shows the protagonist in the title story, and was created by Chiara Topo, of the Scuola Internazionale di …

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